Monday, January 23, 2017

Drakhun Down

I've never liked the whole "MOW-on-a-horse" thing, mainly because I had a hard time believing a horse could take that weight. OK, it's a fantasy world and all that, it's a very large horse, etc... I dunno, I just feel sorry for the horse. So when I was putting mine together, I took the opportunity to use something... else...

In order to take that much weight on a single leg, I pinned and reinforced the leg with not one, but three strong pins, and filled the base with milliput to help weigh it down. Funnily enough I had to bend the leg itself a little to get the pose to look right - the original model (Khurasan's He-Who-Kills) is 15mm scale, and actually looking down as if to chomp down on a small animal.

I decided to skip the reins (the Drakhun doesn't have any free hands anyway), but I did give him a saddle. I tried to add some detail to keep it visually interesting.

Funnily enough, the original Drakhun didn't have any stirrups. That just doesn't make any sense, so I did my best to give him some. I also sculpted a simple texture for the bottom of his feet, to replace the smooth flat surface that was originally there.

This was another one of my slow-burn projects; I started this in 2015, and even impatiently threw him into a game as soon as he was assembled (he was killed without ever getting to make a single attack... which pretty much always happens the first time you play a new model that you're excited to use).

It's been a really busy few months, but I finally got tired of seeing his disassembled parts (I left the two pieces separate for painting) and decided to finish him. So I took whatever time I could find (very, very little lately), and slowly got the paint where it needed to be. Finally he was painted, glued together, and ready to be varnished.

And then he fell down and hit the floor. His head broke off, his mohawk-blade-thing bent 90 degrees, and both his arms were knocked loose.

As you can imagine, I was about ready to kill someone. Well, I picked up the pieces and checked them over. The arms didn't look bad, the head would be a problem but I could probably figure something out. It would be a lot of work to fix the parts and the paint job, but probably do-able. Then I noticed that the model seemed to be bent.

It might not be obvious from the photos, but the leg seemed to have bent slightly in such a way that the model was now tilted. I tried to bend it back, but it just kind of broke off from the base a little at the foot. I wasn't sure I could fix it properly such that it would be robust and stand up to normal use, aaaaaand at that point I just gave in to my rage and destroyed the model, throwing the pieces away.

So yeah, I'm extremely angry and depressed and dispirited and demotivated. And now I'm feeling regret that I destroyed the model instead of trying to fix it as best I could. I liked this one, and put a lot of work into it; I had a blog/forum post title all ready to go and everything (it was going to be a click-baity line about a MOW on a horse being a stupid idea, then the first line of the post would be something sarcastic about how this is much less silly).

It's just... I'm always busy. This is my hobby, this is what I enjoy, I have dozens of projects that I want to finish, things I've started years ago in some cases, and yet I just never seem to have enough time or energy to put much work into them, and yet I keep accumulating new ones. Just yesterday I had an idea for the mini-Juggernaut model I have lying around, but even though it's a really simple idea I don't know when I'll actually ever be able to do finish it; probably 2020 at this rate. I don't know, I go online and see blogs where people finish an entire army in a month or two, and yet here I am, putting everything I have into finishing a dozen models a year (if I'm lucky).

It feels like something that should be a hobby, but has turned into a second job. What should I do, just give up and go back to spending what little free time I have on videogames? Just keep throwing away the few minutes I get to myself with nothing to show for it at the end? I mean, this hobby is itself a waste of time, but at least I get something (small, trivial, and unimportant) to show for it at the end, right?

I dunno, some days I'm just sick of everything. Today is one of those days.

2 comments:

I dunno, it didn't feel right to me. I could have fixed it, but I just lost my cool and ended up making things much worse. I actually fished it out of the garbage eventually, and I've started trying to fix it; hopefully I'll end up with something good enough eventually, but I've been too busy to give it too much time.